I vary by 1-5 pounds every time I weight myself. Water accounts for most of the difference. It's the trend that matters. If she's lost 42 lbs, she may need to reduce calories further to continue a weight loss if that's her goal.

4 HOURS PER WEEK ON AN ELIPTICAL????? That's awful. How can she stand it? My mind it totally numb after 3 minutes on one of those things. But only 1 hour of strength training. Hmmm... There is a lot that is backwards in the world.

It is possible that her body is responding by storing fat. She has lost 42 pounds in the last 6 months so her body could be already in starvation mode (though 7 pounds a months seems like a healthy weight loss). With the increase in exercise, her body might be responding by storing fat and slowing her metabolism.

She may be spending too much time on the elliptical and as a result it increases her appetite. She may be under reporting her food intake. Everyone does.

She should cut back the cardio. Go for a leisurely walk every day instead. Instead of 1 intense strength session, get her going EVERY day. Make it very light so she doesn't get sore, then increase the load each gradually. Keep it short, say 30 minutes and make it whole body with at least 1 push, 1 pull and 1 squat exercise. Once it starts to get heavy, cut it to every second day and then crank it up.

If she only weight trains once a week, of course she's going to be sore! If I lay off a week and then hit it again, I get sore, too. I even get sore training 3 days a week if I only do the big lifts every fourth workout.

20 minutes of cardio 3 times a week is plenty for cardiovascular health. A half-hour of weights 3 times a week would be a big benefit.

Another problem with your question is that calories are not a precise measure of the energy content of food. They are a measure of how much heat you get from the food if you dessicated it and burn it in a bomb calorimeter. Extracting energy chemically as our bodies do isn't the same thing. We use calories as a rough surrogate for energy content because we don't have anything else to use.

Exercise machines use assumptions of average people for their crude calculations. I was interested in Kenny's numbers. There is no way everyone who makes a machine do a certain number of revolutions is burning the same amount of energy. Height, weight, body type, fitness level all affect it. The number on the little readout might be useful for comparing one session to another for the same person, but not for the kind of estimates you are trying to make.

This sort of thing happens all the time. Your body will lower your BMR as you diet. She should be noticing some tiredness. So she is actually burning less energy than she thinks during the day and during exercise.

Jungledoc brings up some very good points. Especially how inaccurate calories are, (both food and exercise machines). Read that post carefully.

It is sometimes very difficult to tell if you are burning more than you are taking in. Especially if your body is trying to conserve fat by down regulating your metabolism.

There are a lot of contradicting advice, she's working out to much, and the cal counters are grossly over estimating cal burned in which she needs to lift more often.

It's not really conflicting.

There are 2 points everyone has agreed on.

1) 4 hours of eliptical are too much and the calorie burn is misleading.

2) 1 intense weight training session per week is not appropriate.

I want to explain point 2 a bit more. Repeated bouts of low intensity training builds conditioning. You can train frequently without getting sore. if you go as hard as you can without properly preparing yourself, you will get sore and it will take a week to recover. Therefore, weekly workouts are guaranteed to be painful. The answer is to take it easy, but to workout more frequently.

The conflicting info you got is that I said to train every day, Doc said to take a week off, Kenny said to workout 3 times a week. In fact we're all in agreement on on the main points.

I assumed that she would wait until her scheduled workout to start. That's the week off. Next, the priority is to prepare her muscles. That's the conditioning. Think of it like rehab. You can do very light rehab exercises 3 times/day and they don't make you sore. I just want her to get used to like workouts and you can build conditioning best with daily workouts. Once that's done, she can move to a steady state routine of 3 times a week or every second day.

In summary,

Wait until her scheduled weight training day,
Do a VERY light workout consisting of 3 sets of a push, pull and squat. Body weight works best.
Repeat often.
Progressively increase load over a period of a few weeks until weight is challenging.
Continue progressively increasing intensity as often as she is able.
Continue strength training for life.

Note: One high intensity session per week is called HIT and is recommended by a number of popular books like "Body by Science" and "Slowburn". They don't publicize the pain part very much.

Yeah, I agree. It's not "contradicting". Each of us has put in a bit of information, and I think Stu has summarized it well.

In regard to the amount of cardio she's doing, Peter posted (in his blog) a link to an article about the "if a little is good, then a lot must be better" approach to exercise. Here it is. I think it will clarify what I was saying about the diminishing benefits form excess cardio.

It's hard for me to imagine anyone sustaining 4 1-hour sessions on an elliptical for very long. For any technique that you use for weight loss to be truly effective, it has to be something that you can keep doing for the rest of your life. I can't believe that any sane person could stand to take 4 hours out of every week of their life to waddle on one of those vile machines, I just can't.

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